Natural History

The Adanson Botanical Illustrations is a world-famous 18th century collection of the French naturalist Michel Adanson (1717-1806). Adansons books, botanical illustrations, manuscripts and letters from the personal library are curated by the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation. In the framework of a scholarly cooperation between the Hunt Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science the Adanson illustrations are digitized and made for the first time openly and freely available for research in ECHO.

Herbaria and other scientific collections are - in addition to a large library - essential parts of a research institute specializing in taxonomic botany. The fate of such an institute is, therefore, closely linked with the fate of its collections.
The largest and most important collection of the Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem was that of C. S. Kunth, Vice-Director of the Botanical Garden, who died in 1850. Before he took over the position in Berlin, he had lived in Paris from 1815 to 1828 while working on the plants collected by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland in America. Kunth's herbarium was a collection of ca. 70.000 specimens, comprising about 54,500 species, and contained ca. 3,000 types of taxa described in the "Nova genera et species . . ." as well as many duplicates from the herbarium in Paris, and plants from the botanical gardens in Paris and Berlin and other important collections.
The BGBM offers on-line access to 207871 specimen records with 150945 high-resolution images from 229 countries from its herbarium holdings.